SpotlightOnSpend reacts to open criticism
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After a couple of years in the sun, the outright optimism of the open data movement is beginning to give way to healthy scepticism and lively debate.
Today, for example, an influential blogger on the topic of open data in local government posted a highly-critical piece about SpotlightOnSpend, a commercially-run site through which councils can publish their spending data. You can read his post here.
The way in which the site publishes spending data, CountCulture points out, does not comply with the government’s draft open data guidelines, which are modeled on principles generally accepted by experts. SpotlightOnSpend’s data is not machine-readable, for example, it is presented in a summarised rather than raw form and it can only be downloaded for personal use - rather than an under an explicitly open licence.
While some councils publish the data separately in a way that does conform to these principles, others use SpotlightOnSpend as the sole public platform for expenditure data. CountCulture argued that this constitutes giving Spikes Cavell, the company behind the website, access to the data “on a privileged basis”.
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CountCulture’s analysis was excoriating. “Let me be absolutely clear here: This is not open data, not a desirable approach, will not achieve the results of transparency or of equality of access, and is not good for the public sector.”
I contacted Spikes Cavell this afternoon for their reaction. The company’s chief executive Luke Spikes welcomed the criticism, but felt that one point had been overlooked – that it is first and foremost a spend analysis software and consultancy supplier, and that it publishes data through SpotlightOnSpend as a free, optional and supplementary service for its local government customers. The hope is that this might help the company to win business, he explains, but it is not a money-spinner in itself.
“The contribution we’re making to transparency is less about what the purists would like to see, it's simply putting the information out there in a form that is useful for the audience for which it is intended [i.e. citizens and small businesses]” he said. “But there are a few things we haven’t done right, and we’ll fix that.”
Following the criticism, Cavell says that SpotlighOnSpend will make the data available for download in its raw form. “That’s what we thought was the most sensible solution to overcoming this obstacle," he told me.
Whether this will will satisfy the critics is questionable, however, as there appears to be an ideological component to this dispute.
Unlike their Labour predecessors – who were equally vocal advocates of open data – the Conservative wing of the coalition government has emphasised the benefits to the private sector. “It will boost British jobs,” Francis Maude, now Cabinet Office minister, wrote on the eve of the election. "Businesses and social entrepreneurs … will build new applications and services using previously locked-up government data."
Cavell, who was inspired to launch SpotlightOnSpend by an article written by Tory leader David Cameron and whose site carries on endorsement from communities secretary Eric Pickles, says the Conservative party recognises that the grand vision of open data cannot be achieved without the involvement of businesses.
“The public sector will not be able to do this on its own,” he says. “There are not enough enthusiasts out there with enough time to get this done properly for the whole of the public sector. They are going to have to work with a whole bunch of people who might otherwise be uneasy bedfellows.”
This debate touches not only on the role of government and the private sector, but also the value of data versus understanding – a critical topic in an information overloaded era. And it has only just begun.
An "enthusiast" writes:
Council spending data is an area in which principle and pragmatism happily coincide.
The principle is that public data belongs to the public and that government has a duty to release it in a way that is most useful to everyone that might want to use it.
The pragmatic view is that the public will be best served by having as many different ways as possible to view, consume and understand this data as possible. Some will want to load the raw data straight into their databases and spreadsheets. Some will want to use sophisticated applications that provide summaries, context and comparison tools and wouldn't know what to do with a raw data set.
A genuine open data approach is the only one that satisfies both these requirements. With more applications we get more transparency and hopefully better scrutiny. There is scope for the public sector, the private sector, voluntary groups and individuals to contribute their ideas and their energy to this process. There are plenty of people out there with the time, the talent and the inclination to have a go.
But this can't happen unless the data is available in a machine-readable format with an open licence. Everyone that wants it needs to be given the legal right and the technical facility to build their own applications around this data. If that doesn't happen, not only do you break the principle of giving the public unrestricted access to its own data but you get less and worse scrutiny, defeating the whole purpose of the exercise. It's not "purism" to say that we can only scrutinise this data properly if everyone can use it however they choose. It's just common sense.
There is room for Spikes Cavell to develop their applications and I doubt that anyone has any objection to them offering their services to councils commercially just like thousands of other businesses. But they do not have a monopoly of ideas, talent and resources to build great applications with public spending data. Nor does anyone else.
The concerns that @CountCulture raised were not that Spikes Cavell were trading with councils or trying to attract their business but that they are doing so in a way that precludes anyone else developing applications with this data. By legally and technically locking the data into the Spotlight on Spend platform, everyone else is excluded.
The Armchair Auditor scoreboard (my own website) shows that the only two councils currently publishing their data in an unrestricted way that can be used by the whole community -- the GLA and Windsor and Maidenhead -- aren't doing it through Spikes Cavell's Spotlight on Spend.
It's understandable that most councils have no understanding of the culture, legalities or technicalities of open data. This is new territory for nearly all of them. Those councils that have put their data straight onto Spotlight on Spend, bypassing the part where it is made genuinely open -- cannot be criticised for not complying with what to them must be a very unusual requirement. But that's why @CountCulture and I and others want to be very clear that the end result of this process is having effective scrutiny of council finances through multiple websites and applications, not just Spotlight on Spend or any other single website or application. The way we get there is with open data.
Luke Spikes says, "There are not enough enthusiasts out there with enough time to get this done properly for the whole of the public sector. They are going to have to work with a whole bunch of people who might otherwise be uneasy bedfellows."
He couldn't be more wrong about the first part. He's right about the second part, but not in the way he presumably means.
Two independent applications have already been developed, almost literally overnight, for publishing and analysing this data. If all the councils publish their raw spending data on their websites in a standardised format it will be trivial to load it all into these applications and any others. Councils will be advised on how to standardise their data and give it an open licence. The data-loading process can easily be automated on an ongoing basis. Once the data is there, the applications and analyses themselves can be progressively refined.
Councils will have to work with "uneasy bedfellows" -- but not the businesses like Spikes Cavell that Luke Spikes presumably has in mind.
They already work with plenty of businesses already. The unusual newcomers will be the independent developers and voluntary projects such as my own Armchair Auditor and @CountCulture's OpenlyLocal.
Working unpaid and often unacknowledged, we have no contractual duties to discharge or shareholders to satisfy. That gives us the freedom to work with the data and present it in a way that we think will be most useful to the public (or just ourselves!) rather than working around others' priorities. As our projects are open source, others can use our code as a base to build in different directions if they choose.
Our culture is built upon making it easy for others to use and improve our work for their own ends. This doesn't necessarily mean we'll do a better job than Spotlight on Spend or any other business, but it gives an undeniable advantage when what you're really trying to produce is scrutiny and transparency regardless of whether it turns a profit or makes anyone uncomfortable.
As an example, here are some things that Armchair Auditor can do that Spotlight on Spend can't:
- browse spend by council department/service
- view and link to individual payments
- download easy-to-use extracts of department or supplier spend to a spreadsheet
- annotate and discuss individual payments, departments and suppliers
- filter payments by level of spend
While Spikes Cavell and OpenlyLocal could come up with a similar list of (currently) exclusive features in their software, the point is that there's more than one way to do it. Councils need to work in a way that encourages multiple and diverse applications and approaches so that the public is best served.
A little "enthusiasm" can go a long way. Just give us the raw data and the right to use it as we please and we'll do the rest.
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Adrian Short (Armchair Auditor)
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